People using Openswan for the first time find it very hard to read the error messages provided, which are rather technical in their description of the problem. People are quick to try to solve this by getting more debugging information using the plutodebug=
and klipsdebug=
flags, but this is not necessary and in fact, often makes things much harder for the user, as well as helpful people on the mailing list, if your message is not rejected by the mailing list for being too big to begin with.
Even in the standard configuration without any debugging enabled, Openswan logs all the information needed to debug a configuration issue. Just make sure to look at the proper log files. Usually, the startup and shutdown messages go in the general log file (often /var/log/messages
), while most other log entries go to a different log file for somewhat more serious errors (usually /var/log/secure
or /var/log/auth.log
).